The Righteous Gemstones' NSFW Finale Scene Came With A Lot Of Laughs BTS
This article contains spoilers for "The Righteous Gemstones" season 3 finale.
I'm not a religious person, but if Heaven is real, I hope it looks like the Y2K orgy with several women, Walton Goggins, Shea Whigham, and a man who may or may not be Gene Hackman from the cold open of the season 3 finale of "The Righteous Gemstones." Now that your eyes have retracted back into your skull after reading that sentence, let me explain. "The Righteous Gemstones" has quietly existed as the prodigal son of HBO since 2019, performing a perfect balancing act between satirical blasphemy, the art of ribaldry, and a southern-fried helping of empathy. Centering a show in the already nonsensical world of mega-church televangelism has allowed the series to convincingly present characters with Goliath-sized personalities, but few are as memorable (or memeable) as Walton Goggins' Uncle Baby Billy Freeman.
Uncle Baby Billy is a former Christian child star turned televangelist conman, and spends most of the show trying to weasel his way into the Gemstone family fortune, as his sister Aimee-Leigh (Jennifer Nettles) and her marriage to patriarch Eli Gemstone (John Goodman) amassed wealth beyond our wildest imaginations. He's constantly pulling off ridiculous get-rich-quick schemes, like his season 3 attempt to rip off "Family Feud" for Christians with "Baby Billy's Bible Bonkers." Like the rest of the Gemstone clan, Uncle Baby Billy is also the furthest thing from pious, with a reputation as a lying, womanizing narcissist who abandons his children. And yet, it's hard not to love him, because Walton Goggins' commitment to the character is comedy gold.
And that commitment was pushed to the limit during the season 3 finale, when Goggins and co-star Shea Whigham, actors in their 50s known for playing tough guys, filmed an extremely NSFW orgy scene which showed them being simultaneously ridden by hot babes while laying face to face with one another.
A Justified connection
During a recent interview with Vulture (conducted prior to the WGA and SAG strikes), Goggins talked about his working relationship with Whigham, as the two have shared the screen throughout their careers. The two shared a pivotal scene in the show "Justified" where Goggins' Boyd Crowder carjacks Shea Whigham's character Hagan and kills him before saying, "I'm an outlaw." According to Goggins, the scene was vital to the character. "This scene came down the pike, and it was maybe the most important scene in the evolution of Boyd Crowder," he said. "I asked them, 'Can we get Shea Whigham for that? Because no one will deliver like Shea in that moment.'" He continued:
"We did get him, and Shea was gracious enough to come and play with us. I told him what this meant to me personally — what it means to the show, yes, but what it means to me to go through this experience with [him.] We got to work that day and it was as if we'd never met. [...] We got everything that we needed, and I'm forever grateful to him. I did the same thing for a pilot that I did for CBS; I said, 'Just get me Shea Whigham.' He's the sauce, he's the special, special sauce."
From that moment on, Goggins and Whigham have remained in touch, and their working relationship helped lead to Whigham's casting as Dusty Daniels, an evangelical racecar driver the Gemstone family is trying to keep as one of the celebrity attendees of their church. As it turns out, Dusty and Baby Bill go way back and have an intimate connection he'd certainly want to keep secret from his devout fanbase. Whigham agreed to the role despite the two men not fully understanding what their orgy scene would entail, and we are all blessed because of it.
Where were you during Y2K?
Vulture thankfully asked Goggins about his orgy scene with Whigham and the actor delivered some hysterical behind-the-scenes stories. "We had a glass of wine — I think a bottle of wine — and said, 'Here we go.' We showed up and met the intimacy coordinator, Zuri Pryor-Graves, who was much more willing to push the boundaries than we were, [laughs] It's like, 'Wait a minute, you're supposed to police this!'"
Goggins laughed of course, and confirmed that Pryor-Graves handled the scene with "grace and humor," but said that everybody in the scene really went for it. For a show about a religious dynasty, the orgy scene looks like something out of a "Game of Thrones" brothel. There are people boning everywhere, washed in red lighting with tons of full-frontal nudity. In the center of the room? Baby Billy and Dusty Daniels lay side by side, looking into each other's eyes and aggressively moaning as two women hump the hell out of them. "Hold up, did you f*** Dusty Daniels?" Danny McBride's Jesse Gemstone asks Baby Billy as he tells the tale. "I doubt it," he replies, "But you can never know."
According to Goggins, they filmed the scene around 15 times. "You think it's awkward, and it's awkward the very first time, and then afterward, everyone's just like talking and bulls***ting in between takes," he said. "It becomes nothing." To make things even funnier, director Jody Hill, who also often appears as Jesse's friend Levi on the show, gave the duo the instruction to "Just look at each other like 'I'm going to f*** everything! I'm going to f*** you too!'" said Goggins. "We just got to that place. It's just trust and honesty. Afterward, we both laughed to no end."
Me too, Goggins. Me too.